Many organizations store information which must be operated on in a definite sequence. For example, the information may have to be reviewed or commented on by various persons or departments in a prescribed order. Work may have to be done in a particular progression. In such organizations, it is important to be able to quickly locate the information requiring attention, and to immediately know its status, so that the next required step in the operation may be started
Computers are increasingly being used for this purpose, but they are subject to the hazard of breakdown. Moreover the use of computers has obscured the fact that a conventional three ring or multi-ring notebook can serve many of the functions that computers are now serving. For example, information can be added or removed from the notebook by simply adding or removing pages containing information. Nonetheless, information stored among many sheets of paper among many notebooks is not easily accessible.
In the past, book marks and line guides, as exemplified in the patents to Lansing U.S. Pat. No. 2,108,494; Wegner U.S. Pat. No. 3,719,161; Peters U.S. Pat. No. 3,324,823; Wilkin U.S. Pat. No. 3,683,844; Bouvier U.S. Pat. No. 1,999,583; Baukus U.S. Pat. No. 1,658,499; and Steven U.S. Pat. No. 1,658,499, have been developed for the purpose of locating pages in a book or to enable a typist to accurately follow a line on a page. However, these devices were not concerned with the problem of conveniently retrieving information requiring attention and at the same time visually indicating the next operational step required.
What is needed therefore, and comprises an important object of this invention is to provide a combined information retrieval device and status indicator.